How come Texans.....Part Three in a Series



I would venture to say that not a single statue of a Road Runner was ever made in Ohio. 







 

         Texans have distinguished themselves on every field of battle since our own war for independence from Mexico.  Although General Zachery Taylor abhorred the lack of discipline shown by the Texas Rangers during the US/Mexican war of 1846,  he said the Texans were the best fighting men he had ever seen.  During the Civil War, Robert E. Lee advised anyone who was unsure of what to do in battle to “watch those Texans over there and do what they do.”

On March 27, 1836, Col. James Fannin was executed in this courtyard, after he was forced to watch the execution of 342 of his men.

     Although Texas only had 5 percent of the national population during World War II, Texans made up 7 percent of the armed forces.  The supreme allied commander in the Pacific, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, grew up in Fredericksburg.  General Dwight Eisenhower was born in Dennison and General Douglas MacArthur graduated from Texas Military Institute in San Antonio.  Somewhere I read that Texas A&M has provided more generals for the U.S. Army than West Point.

     The most decorated soldier in the Army was Audie Murphy from Hunt County.  The most decorated Navy officer was Cmdr. Samuel Dealy from Dallas.  Thirty three Texans, including these two, received the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War II.  All in all, Texas provided 750,000 personnel for the war effort and 22,000 Texans died in that war.

     Young Texans trained for the battlefields of life on the gridiron.  Long before “Friday Night Lights” made the nation aware of the football mania that engulfs Texas, high school football was an obsession here.  Pimply-faced kids learned courage, self-sacrifice, discipline, and teamwork on the footfall field.  Oil-rich alums imported outstanding players by providing jobs for their parents.  These same young athletes became local celebrities and were worshipped by their neighbors…. and by their neighbor’s daughters.

     I remember a scene from Texas author Larry McMurtry’s “Last Picture Show.”  From inside a darkened car at a drive-in movie, a breathy female voice says, “We shouldn’t be doing this.  You weren’t even in the backfield.”

     For decades, Texas high schools provided the bulk of athletes to the old Southwest Conference.  That conference is now history and college football is national in scope, so we provide campuses around the country with talented, disciplined, well-conditioned "troops."  Even recent national champion Oklahoma has more Texans on the roster than natives of Oklahoma.

     All these military and athletic accomplishments contribute to the vast pride that Texans feel in their homeland and in themselves.  We also find a lot of other things to be proud of.

     Nowhere is this more evident than in my particular homeland, the high plains of the Texas Panhandle.   Most days, the air is so clear and the sun so bright it hurts your eyes.  The wind blows constantly; it geometrically multiplies the effects of heat or cold.  In summer, 100 degree days are not uncommon and, in winter, a “Blue Norther” can drop the temperature 50 degrees in four hours. Droughts sometimes last several years, yet the average annual rainfall has been known to come in four days.  People who live here learn to cope with the weather.  We learn to adjust to our climate, for it will not adjust to us.  We brag to outsiders about  brutal weather,  fickle rainfall, and cruel winds.

     In the fall of 1879, among the first settlers in the Lubbock vicinity were four families of Quakers, headed by a fellow named Paris Cox.  Paris and his sons dug a half-dugout, but the other three families chose to live in tent-like structures.  After suffering through an extremely cold and punishing winter, in the spring a violent sandstorm came through and blew the tents away.  Three families loaded up and went back to Indiana.   Paris Cox and his wife remained.   In June of 1880, their daughter, Bertha, was the first non-Indian child born in Lubbock County. 

     We who live here are richly rewarded for our tenacity.   Achingly beautiful sunsets promise a new and better tomorrow.  We share a never-changing, ever-changing sky with each other and anyone else aware enough to notice.  We breathe the fresh, clean air and squint in the bright sunshine.  We’re surrounded by friendly, honest, helpful neighbors.  We know we live in the best place on earth.  All we have to do is look around; we’re on the Caprock in West Texas, up on the high plains, not far from Lubbock.

     Texans think this way.  We think there is value in overcoming hardship and we take pride in simple things, like new socks.   We learn to harness a deeply held, burning ambition to improve ourselves and our position in life.  My friend, Frank Williamson, who was born into soul-crushing poverty on a dirt farm outside Morton, Texas, may have said it best, "When you grow up like I did, you would just about rather die than fail to suceed."
      We display the Lone Star Flag at equal height with the American Flag because we’re the only state in the nation that can.  It is written into the treaty we signed when we joined the Union.  (Sadly, this changed.  On June 22, 1942, the United States Flag Code was adopted.  This allowed other states to fly their flags at equal height with the U.S. flag, and, by association, the Texas flag.)  We love Texas and we love America and a lot of our young people have demonstrated a willingness to die for either of those flags.  

       I know some outsiders will think I’m bragging, and I hate that.  Anyone who knows the first thing about Texans knows we’re just as humble as all get out.

My grandsons at the Mule Statue in Muleshoe.  I bet there's not a fiberglas statue of a mule anywhere in New England.   And look at those flowers--growing right there in the panhandle.

     

    

How Come Texans.....Part Two in a Series

Spindletop, 1901.  Within a few years, America, because of Texas, was the largest oil-producing country in the world.

      In late 1900 and early 1901, an oil man named Anthony F. Lucas drilled a well on Spindletop Hill in Beaumont, Texas.  On January 10, 1901, at 1139 feet, the well blew in and sent a column of oil 150 feet into the air.  It took nine days to cap the flow, and the well produced over 100,000 barrels of oil per day.  Within a year there were over 200 similar wells in Beaumont and both Texaco and Gulf Oil had been formed to develop the Spindletop Field.  The East Texas Oil Fields followed within a few years, and later, vast quantities of oil were discovered in West Texas.

     Texas was an agrarian state.   Some rich merchants, a few astute businessmen, and a smattering of professional people---doctors, lawyers, and the like, prospered in the state, but most people were farmers or ranchers, living off, and on, the land.  My grandparents were typical.  With thirteen children, they scratched out a living on eighty acres in the backwoods of East Texas. At Christmas time, the little ones got penny candy, an orange, an apple and maybe half-dozen pecans.  My ancestors did not strike oil, but many folks in similar circumstances did.

     Consider the case of Granddad’s forty-year old neighbor who had a wife and eight children.  For this exercise, we’ll just call him “Tex.” He farmed eighty acres of rocky Texas soil with a Georgia Stock plow and two mules.  If Tex worked hard and it rained, he might net five hundred dollars in a good year.   If it did not rain, no matter how hard he worked, he was down at the local bank with his hat in his hands.  And it did not rain a lot.

     One day, some big city dudes came by and offered to lease Tex’s land for five dollars an acre and allow him keep a full one-eighth of whatever oil they found.  He nervously signed, mainly because of the lease payment. Tex had never seen four hundred dollars in one place at one time.  The dudes hit a gusher, followed quickly by several more.

     Oil, at the time, was worth almost a dollar a barrel, so, within six months, ole Tex was making $8000.00 a day, seven days a week, thirty days a month, three hundred sixty five days a year.  His wife got her dream home and Tex even put a shiny new washing machine on the front porch.  His kids all got new sports cars---foreign jobs. That local bank asked him to be on the board of directors.  Tex went to Neiman-Marcus in Dallas and bought three hundred sixty five pairs of socks.  He had promised himself, if he ever got rich, he would wear a brand new pair of socks every day.  To Tex, that was the ultimate luxury.

     By the time Tex was forty-two, he bought an airplane and learned to fly.  He liked it so much, he bought a bigger airplane.  Tex called his wife “Mama” and took her to New York City to see Broadway shows.  He drank Jack Daniels whiskey and smoked Cuban cigars.  He wore alligator boots and Stetson hats and talked long and loud.  In fancy restaurants, he ordered $100 bottles of champagne and told the waiter to keep them coming.  What’s the good of being rich if you can’t show off?

      This windfall didn’t just happen that one time. Over a fifty year period, it happened thousands of times, to Texans from all walks of life in all sorts of financial situations.  Each handled the event in their own way, most without ostentation, but many reacted exactly like Tex.  The trickle-down effects of the oil money boosted the economy of the whole state and everyone shared to some extent in the overall prosperity.

     Tex always knew, in his heart of hearts, that he didn’t deserve all that money, but he was not about to give it back.  He continued to live large, but the wells slowly began to dry up.  One day, he discovered that he owed more than he could possibly repay, and his legal team advised him to declare bankruptcy.  He told everyone who would listen, “Them stupid, silly, ignorant damn bankers loaned me more money than I could pay back.”

     Tex, and hundreds of people like him, travelled all over the world spreading big tips, cigar ashes, and whiskey bottles as self-appointed good-will ambassadors for the State of Texas.  They created the stereotypical image of a loud, obnoxious Texan that permeates popular literature, media, and consciousness.  They also did something much more important for their state.

       These Oil Men demonstrated to a bunch of hungry young Texans that anything is possible.  They built a fire-in-the-belly ambition into several generations of farm kids growing up in near poverty.  Guys like Tex became role models.  They showed us that there is always a way out and we don’t have to accept our fate as so many of our ancestors did.  We can do better.  We can amount to something.  We don’t have to hang our heads.   We can stand up on our hind legs and look any man in the eye.

       Tex, and others like him, gave us ambition, optimism, and attitude.  If we don’t strike oil, there are lots of other ways to succeed.  All we need to do is choose a path and work like hell.  After all, this is still Texas.

     That about covers the loud and obnoxious segment of our population…in the next episode we will explore the universal and unrelenting pride in Texas…..and all things Texan……stay tuned.

How come Texans are so dad-blamed proud of themselves and their state. A series...





Built of Texas Pink Granite, quarried at Marble Falls. 308 feet to top of Goddess of Liberty Statue

  

     A friend of mine wondered aloud about Texas and Texans.  She was first exposed to Texans as a high school student in California, during the late forties.   Many Texas families moved to California back then, searching for jobs.  The Texas children attended local schools and complained long and loud about everything in California, while they bragged long and loud about everything in Texas. As one might expect, this did not endear them to the natives.

     I was, at first, tempted to simply ignore her concern as just another foreigner who didn’t understand my part of the world.  I suspected that much of the braggadocio of the high school kids might have been based upon feelings of inadequacy.  After all, they were in a strange new environment and most of the rules they had grown up with simply didn’t apply.  I did not care to make excuses for a bunch of displaced high school kids who ticked off some natives in California over sixty years ago.

     I soon realized that I could not let it pass.  Those kids had been rude and immature, and perhaps a bit obnoxious, but they were Texans.  I had no choice.  I was duty-bound to defend them.

     Texas was born as a territory of Spain in the early 1500’s.  Spain planned to work its tried and true method of colonization on this province---put in missions, augmented by a presidio with troops.  Thus equipped,  they could either kill the heathen Indians or save their souls, enslave them, and finally populate the territory with loyal subjects of the Spanish King.  It worked in South America and Mexico---it should work in Texas.  For three hundred years they tried this and all they had to show for their efforts was a bunch dismembered priests and scalped soldiers.  They learned the hard way---Comanche do not plant beans.

      The Spanish, and the Mexicans after 1824, decided to establish a “buffer zone” between themselves and the Comanche.  They would allow Anglo settlers into Texas, on the frontier next to the Indians, and move the loyal Catholic subjects of the king into the protected areas behind them.  How do you suppose that worked?

     Some of the original Anglo settlers who came to Texas were honest, hard-working farmers, looking for places to build their homes and establish their families.  A big portion of the settlers were opportunists, looking to make their fortunes by land speculation, real estate development or other popular games of chance.  Most of the rest were fugitives, running from failed businesses, failed marriages, or failed attempts in other places.  There were common threads in this rag-tag bunch; wanderlust, a zest for adventure, self-reliance, the will to work, and a supreme (if sometimes misplaced) confidence in their own abilities.

     While the folks along the east coast were going to the opera, and other future states were dutifully surveying boundaries, holding elections and standing in line to be admitted to the Union, Texans were fighting and dying at the Alamo, Goliad, and Coleta Creek.  Through sheer luck and monumental bluff, in 1836 Sam Houston wrested control of Texas from Mexico.  The government of Mexico was in shambles---strong arguments suggest that Mexico is not yet capable of self-government.  Due to the political disarray in Mexico City, a counter attack against the rebels was not mounted,  and Texas somehow managed to survive as an independent republic.

     After ten years, Texas finally became the twenty-eighth state in the United States, and the only state to come into the union by treaty, not annexation.   The US/Mexican War of 1846-1848 was predictable and necessary to resolve boundary disputes between Texas and Mexico, and other little things that Sam Houston and Santa Anna had let fall through the cracks in the Treaties of Velasco.   Mexico, through diplomatic channels, had warned the US that war would result if Texas was annexed.

        As a side benefit of this war with Mexico over Texas, the United States fulfilled its “Manifest Destiny” by acquiring title to the remaining western territory still under Mexican control.   A large part of Colorado, all of Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, California, and Utah, and bits of Texas, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas became property of the United States because of this obscure little war.  The Gadsden Purchase in 1853 defined the final US/Mexican border and completed the territories of New Mexico and Arizona.

     After the Civil War, during reconstruction, Edmond Davis, a staunch Unionist, was elected governor of Texas. His idea of reconstruction was more punitive than constructive.  Texans again suffered, but endured.  Tribulations like these left the citizens of Texas with a strong mistrust in the federal government which remains to this day.

     Construction of the Texas State Capitol Building was finished in 1888 and by a strange coincidence, it ended up twenty feet taller that the Nation’s Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.  Texans, in their usual self-effacing manner, built the San Jacinto Monument in 1936.  When they installed the Lone Star on top, someone thought to measure the total height.  Land Sakes, it is twelve feet taller than the Washington Monument.  Who would've thought it?

Five hundred sixty-seven feet to the top of the star.

     As to how we became so loud, so arrogant, so obnoxious, and so dad-blamed proud of ourselves and our state, stay tuned…. To be continued…..   

Road Trip # 17---Mexican Hat, Utah, Big Horned Sheep, Ridgway and Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Colorado

Mexican Hat---Sixty feet across and twelve feet thick---Ain't that something?

     To any of you who are keeping score, this was day eleven of our road trip, and we left Page, Arizona, before Ten AM, still heading east.  We crossed back into Utah at Monument Valley, and after a visit, continued east through the desert.  About the only settlement on that road is Mexican Hat, Utah.  Eighty-eight people live there; fifty-two of them are American Indians.

     I have always loved the name “Mexican Hat”.  In this case, it identifies a rock formation which resembles a sleeping Mexican covered with a huge sombrero (sixty feet in diameter and twelve feet thick) and was obviously named before everyone got so all-fired politically correct.  Mexican Hat has a sort of ring to it.   “Spanish Stetson” or “Hispanic Headpiece” just wouldn’t have the same magic.

     We eased into Colorado near the village of Slick Rock.  Wayne and I both have a preference for back roads and we enjoyed a lot of them on this leg of our journey.  We were on a narrow, curvy section of a narrow, curvy highway when we rounded a narrow curve and came face to face with three big-horned Big Horned Sheep.  They were within ten feet of the roadway and either of the three had a trophy size rack. Wayne slammed on the brakes and said,”Get my camera!  Get my camera!” The sheep stared curiously at us for a moment, and then loped up the hill.





      “Get out of the middle of the road,” I shouted.  “You’re gonna get us kilt!”

     “Where’s my camera?  I gotta get a picture!”  Wayne cried.

     “If some dude comes around that curve and runs us over with a cattle truck, you want me to take his picture.  The sheep are gone.”  I answered.  Wayne examined the ridge where the sheep had disappeared and reluctantly started forward.  Our moment had passed.  Big Horned Sheep are shy at best and ones this size are downright anti-social.

     We put Wayne’s camera on the dashboard and continued along little back roads, with fantastic views in every direction.  The snow- covered Rockies were off to the north and east, ahead of us, providing a backdrop for the intricate little valleys spread around us.  Wayne, white knuckled from paying serious attention to the road, said, “Boy, this is quite a drive.  Beautiful country.”

     “You ought to see it from the passenger seat.”  I said.  He was less than overjoyed by that observation.

      We followed similar narrow, curvy two-lane highways almost to Telluride, and then turned left onto the main road into Ridgway, Colorado.  Our friends, Bill and Sybil Hallmark live there and that was our destination for the day.  About a mile before we reached town, we turned left and climbed the mountain to the Hallmark’s home.  The house is perched on the edge of a cliff, about 2500 feet above the town of Ridgway.   At night, the lights of Montrose, forty miles away, are clearly visible.

      The Hallmarks grew up in Lubbock and Wayne and I have known them since high school.  Bill was a year ahead of us and was an All-District running back on the Lubbock Westerners.  That was big stuff in 1954.  Sybil was a year behind us and a legendary beauty.   Bill decided to live in the mountains as soon as he realized there were mountains.  When you grow up in Lubbock, a mountain is a pretty special thing.  Ditto an ocean, and sometimes, even a tree.

     Their magnificent home, (Sybil is an interior designer by trade), is perched on a granite cliff, high above the valley.  Step off the deck, walk twenty feet and you are standing on a flat granite rock overlooking the valley far below.  It is breathtaking.  I have included pictures, because the view is indescribable, at least for my limited vocabulary.



I took this picture about 20 feet from the Hallmarks back door--Just off the deck.



     We arrived in the late afternoon, and Sybil had steaks to grill outside.  The wind was horrible.  Well publicized wildfires were burning on the Arizona/New Mexico border and the smoky haze was spoiling the unbelievable view.  The wind was blowing about thirty miles per hour and gusting while playing havoc with the charcoal grill, but Sybil managed beautifully and the steaks were delicious.

     “One time, when we were about sixteen, Charlie Moore and I took a road trip.”  Bill said, as we talked after dinner. “Dad loaned me a gasoline credit card— the first one I ever saw---and Charlie and I took our bedrolls and headed to the mountains.  We went to Pecos, New Mexico, and decided to go see Pike’s Peak, so we drove up to Colorado.  Then we went to see Jackson Hole, Yellowstone and Glacier National Park.  I didn’t care if we ever went home.”

     “We’d been out more than three weeks,” Bill continued,” and were standing at the Little Big Horn Battlefield Monument in Montana and I got out the map and asked Charlie what he wanted to do next.  He was fighting back tears when he said, ’I want to go home.’”  To this day, no one I know loves to travel more than Bill Hallmark.



Wayne's on the left--I'm the slender, youthful one.  Town of Ridgway is over Wayne's left shoulder.

       Our visit at Ridgway was too short, as all visits with old friends tend to be, but we enjoyed one of Sybil’s great breakfasts next morning and loaded the truck.  Bill apologized for the wind and assured us that it was a rare occurrence.  All four of us had grown up in Lubbock and a little wind was no bother.  We said goodbye, and headed east. Our final destination today was Gunnison, only about a hundred miles, but first, we would see one more National Park.

       The Black Canyon of the Gunnison was designated a national park in 1999.  The canyon was created by several different geological events, followed by a long period of erosion.  The river established  its path through layers of relatively soft volcanic sediment, and then, after its route was determined, it hit the very hard igneous rock.  These layers were very difficult to cut, so consequently, the canyon is deep and narrow---only a half mile wide and over two thousand feet deep.   The river carved out the canyon at the rate of one inch every hundred years.  If my math is correct, that means it took 2.4 million years to cut the narrow canyon.  Far downstream, at about the same time, the Colorado River was cutting the vast Grand Canyon through relatively soft red sandstone.
 

     After a pleasant visit at the National Park headquarters, buying gimme caps and tee shirts for our grandchildren and watching a fascinating film on the history of the Black Canyon, we continued our trip to Gunnison.  We were on our way to visit James Collins and Neil McMullen, also high school friends, and do some fly-fishing at the fabled Anthill.  Stay tuned.



Black Caynon of the Gunnison.  Forty-eight miles long, half mile wide and over 2000 feet deep---all carved by that little river down there.













"I have not the foggiest notion."

New Mexico Oil Field at Sunset.  Photo by Dr. Jerry McLaughlin

      Remembering the Famous Café brought back a lot of other memories.  We were up there two summers, 1956 and 1957.  In 1956, we were finished with our freshman year at Tech, and I still retained some level of innocence.  I wouldn’t dare drink a beer or date a divorcee.  By 1957, I had pretty much outgrown those silly ideas.

      In the summer of 1956, Bill Sparks, Clinton Smith, Neil McMullen and I went to Farmington, New Mexico, to work in the oil fields and save money for college.   We rented a two bedroom apartment in the basement of an older couple’s home,   and the lady of the house more or less adopted us.  She clucked around us like an old hen with her chicks.  She and her husband were Mormons, and two of the nicest people I ever knew.

     Our lives soon became routine---we got up at five-thirty each morning, walked to the Famous Café where we had breakfast and bought a sack lunch, then mounted crew trucks that delivered us to the oil fields.  After work, the trucks dropped us off at the café and we walked back up the hill to our apartment.  We showered and shaved, fixed dinner and went to bed by nine.  I usually read myself to sleep.

      In the fields, we worked as roustabouts; entry level, common labor.  Hard physical labor.  We dug ditches, laid small-diameter pipelines, built fences, poured concrete or painted storage tanks and piping.     We worked outside in the hot, desert sun all day.  We all were deeply tanned and healthy.  Bill Sparks and I were allowing our beards to grow.

     One problem spoiled the summer.  We were teenage boys and there were no teenage girls to spend time with.  We didn’t really expect sex---we wanted it, but hell, truth was, we didn’t get that from the girls back in Lubbock.   Just a girl to talk with would have been nice.  We missed the fresh, clean, teenage-girl smell of Lifebuoy soap and Ipana.  We missed the warm laughter, the silly giggles, holding hands at a movie, the thrill of a goodnight kiss.  We missed girls.

     On our weekly day off, we explored the surrounding area, drove up to Durango, Colorado, or perhaps spent the day at Mesa Verde National Park.  Wherever we went, we were always on the lookout for girls.  Once we drove deep into the desert to see the ruins at Chaco Canyon.  In a tent camp there, we found some bearded, khaki-clad, scholar-types who smoked pipes and worked for National Geographic, but there were no eligible girls.  We looked.

     We looked around town also, but local girls our age didn’t date oil field trash, even oil field trash acting like clean-cut college boys with lots of money.

      One evening after work, I decided to go to the neighborhood mom-pop grocery for some bread and milk.  I had showered and trimmed my beard, and dressed in fresh, clean clothing.  Modest houses lined the street, and as I walked toward the store, the front screen door of one of them opened, and a girl came out and strolled to the sidewalk.  She was a vision, about seventeen and fully developed, if you catch my drift.  She glanced at me as I approached, then turned away and walked toward the mailbox, giving me a long look at what she justifiably considered her best side.

      The young lady was nicely tanned and wore a white cotton blouse over powder blue shorts, just tight enough to expose a hint of panty line.  She had my undivided attention, from her blond pony tail to her tiny ankles, and she knew it.

     “Ask her a question--- any question,” I thought.  My mind raced, and I came up with a dozen really dumb questions. 

      As she turned toward me, I blurted out, “Can you tell me where to find the post office?  I need to mail my transcript to Texas Tech.”

     I was so proud of myself---in one fell swoop, I came up with a sensible question and, at the same time, let her know that I was a college boy, not just plain oilfield trash.

     She looked me up and down and, with just a hint of a smile, said dismissively, “I have not the foggiest notion.”

     She turned, let me gaze once more upon what had suddenly become forbidden fruit, and strolled back to the house.   As she entered, she kept the screen door from slamming by allowing it to bump quietly against that lovely south end.  I envied that screen door.

     That encounter bothered me for years---oh, not the rejection---I’ve been rejected by hordes of pretty girls.  I just couldn’t imagine how a little town girl from Farmington, New Mexico, with a pony tail, nice jugs and a fantastic south end,  ever came up with the phrase, “foggiest notion.”

      

The Famous Cafe

The Shiprock---still forty miles west of Farmington---the good things in life stay that way.

    

     The center of the job market and the social scene in the oil fields around Farmington, New Mexico, in 1956 was the Famous Café.  The café filled a blocky, white stucco building on the main drag, just a half block from the Animas River Bridge, and was convenient for everyone who worked in the fields.   Painted signs in big plate glass windows proclaimed “Open 24 Hours” on one side of the entry and “Air Cooled” on the other.   The air conditioning was provided by a “swamp cooler’, but it was efficient in the low humidity of far northwestern New Mexico.

     A sit-down counter spanned the cafe's entire back wall, in front of the pass-through to the kitchen, booths lined the side walls, and several four-seat tables finished the room.  The waitresses were slender, quick, efficient, and as tough as any field hand.   The over-worked juke box filled the room with the earthy music of Earnest Tubb, Jim Reeves and Webb Pierce.   Warm, inviting aromas of chicken-fried steak, hamburgers and French fries permeated the air-cooled atmosphere.

     Wire line crews, roughnecks, roustabouts, tool pushers, and “hands” gathered here before and after shift change, some looking for work, some looking for help, and some just looking.  Gin pole trucks fitted with removable bench seating queued up out front each morning to take roustabouts to the fields.  A bulletin board behind the cashier’s counter listed available jobs, and crew chiefs hired on the spot every morning at five-thirty.  Depending upon your point of view, that end of the oil business either enjoyed, or suffered, frequent turnovers in the work force.

     The Famous served pancakes, biscuits, sausage, bacon and eggs, plate lunches, hamburgers, French fries, and gallons of coffee and iced tea.   Like the oil fields, it was open 24/7 and anything on the menu was always available.  Dollar-and-a-half sack lunches, with two sandwiches, chips, and dessert, provided an invaluable service for a bunch of hungry boys away from home for the first time.  For larger appetites, three-sandwich lunches were two dollars.

    Our roustabout crew met every morning at the Famous at six.  We had breakfast, picked up our lunches, and climbed onto the appropriate truck at seven.  The trucks took us deep into the desert, dropped us off, and we worked in the hot sun until the trucks returned.  Our time on payroll started when we mounted the trucks at the café and stopped when the trucks picked us up at the end of the day, so we were paid for travelling one way.  We worked ten hours a day, six days a week, and were paid a dollar-fifty per hour, with double time for all over forty hours.  One hundred twenty bucks every week, before taxes.  We were getting rich.

     The walk to the Famous each day was invigorating.  The desert mornings were crisp, the air was fresh and clean, and you could see, as they say, forever.  We could look out west and watch the sunrise light up the Shiprock, forty miles away in the desert.   At the time, I was nineteen years old, eating and sleeping properly and working outside all day, every day.  I was robustly healthy.  I should have paid them---I’ve never felt better.

     I went back to Farmington in 1989 and, with a bit of trouble, located the Famous.  At least I located the building—it was a barber shop.   Like everything else from my youth, it was much smaller than I remembered, but still retained the large windows and stucco facade.  When the new bridge was built and the old one removed, the building was left isolated, away from the action.  It was now alone and lonesome, in an otherwise vacant area, about three blocks west of the new main road. 

     Other things have changed.  Just off the highway to Shiprock, the Navajo Nation has built a gigantic, coal-fired electric generation plant.  The air is hazy now and I doubt if anyone can see the Shiprock from Farmington on most days.  If you fly over the area today, you can see gigantic circles of green vegetation, made possible by circular sprinkler systems drawing water from the Navajo Reservoir.  I understand they grow pumpkins now, out there in the desert, where the Anasazi once lived.

     Everything changes.  No more will a nineteen year old kid learn the rules of life from a rag-tag bunch of oil field hands and skinny waitresses at a twenty-four hour café.  No more will that kid earn enough in a summer to go to college for a full year.  No more will the desert air be so clean and clear that anyone can see details on a vertical shaft of volcanic rock forty miles away.   I will never again be nineteen, with all my dreams spread out in front of me, blissfully unaware of my shortcomings.

      All that happened once and I was there.  I can only be
thankful that I was so priviledged and I can only be sad for all the young people who are forever deprived of that first glimpse of the real world.


Note:   I have tried several times to fix the jammed up paragraph above.  I was not attempting to write free verse poetry.  I wanted it to simply look like, and be spaced like, the paragraphs above, but this machine won't let me fix it and I don't want to write the whole thing over.  Bear with me--or is it bare with me?  I've got a lot to learn about this writing stuff.  Jim